
The Taste of Egypt: Home Cooking from the Middle East
Tom Verde
Dyna Eldaief
2016, AUC Press, 978-977-416-755-3, $35 hb.
While this colorful volume includes many of the usual Egyptian ingredients—fava beans (fuul) and lamb, bulgur and eggplant—it is a far-from-conventional cookbook. To begin with, the author explains that she is “an Australian born to Egyptian parents” who learned many traditional recipes from her mother or relatives in Cairo while taping a Middle Eastern reality-TV cooking show. She adds that “many Egyptian dishes are great for kids,” an often overlooked yet obvious virtue of recipes featuring macaroni and tangy tomato sauce (koshari), lemony sugar syrup (drenching atayef, crunchy, panfried “pillows” of pastry stuffed with walnuts and raisins) and the foundations of an Egyptian mom’s meat loaf (kobeba): ground beef fortified with bulgar and spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. Grown-ups might be more receptive to slow-cooked oxtail (‘akkawi)or lamb brains with egg (mukh ma’el-beid). This book, from an Egyptian cook raised 12,000 kilometers away from the source of her inspiration, holds a little something for everyone.
You may also be interested in...
Old Documents Shed New Light on History in Book Connected to Ancient Islamic World
The painstaking work to recover history—one page at a time—is on brilliant display in this collection of essays focusing on early Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Sogdian manuscripts.Drawing New Conclusions About the Status of Women in Ancient Egypt
Egyptologist Mariam F. Ayad that gender bias among historians accounts for an underrepresentation of women’s lives in historical studies of Egypt.Essays Unpack the Evolving Hajj and Umrah Experience
This volume of essays juxtaposes historical first-hand narratives of Hajj and Umrah journeys with oral interviews of contemporary pilgrims to show the transformative power of storytelling.